This week, the Environmental Protection Agency moved to largely ban the use of trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene, known as TCE and Perc, respectively, in most consumer and commercial uses. You may not have heard of these substances, but they’re all around you, with the chemicals being used frequently in dry cleaning, though their prevalence belies their potential danger.
The EPA has linked them to cancers, nervous and immune system disorders and various other serious health effects. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration is moving to tamp down on the use of an even more common chemical: red dye No. 3, a food coloring and additive that is already banned in the European Union and has been linked to some attention disorders in children and cancers in animals.
Most Americans probably spend little time thinking about the EPA (created under Republican Richard Nixon) and the FDA (created under Republican Teddy Roosevelt) which largely do their work behind the scenes.
But you can bet people will quickly notice if and when the agencies are neutered and responsive to ideological interests of the sort that some around Donald Trump seem interested in pursuing — anti-regulatory, anti-administrative state, except on matters of international trade and immigration.
These agencies are not infallible, but someone has to make the call about what will be allowed in our food, in our air, in our water, as pharmaceutical therapeutics and so on. All things being equal, we’d much prefer these people are the people with the Ph.D.s, who reach their conclusions after litanies of in-depth research, lab testing, peer review and data crunching that would mystify any political appointee or federal judge.
Can regulation be overbearing, go too far? Sure, it happens. Agency experts can get too enthusiastic about what constitutes a hazard, or be fed over-broad instructions from legislators themselves. But the U.S. regulatory apparatus over the last few decades, while far from perfect — just look at the lethargy in dealing with tobacco and opioids, among other things — has been something of a victim of its own success.
Most people take for granted that the food we buy in grocery stores and chemicals used in consumer and industrial applications like dry cleaners won’t kill or injure us, or if that there was such cause for concern, the government would step in and do something about it.
This is not an automatic process; regulators have to be well-resourced and well-supported enough to study the subjects of their mandates and to act on this research, even when it proves unpopular with powerful industry actors. They’ve already been hamstrung by this year’s Supreme Court decision overturning the longtime Chevron precedent, which has put legislators and federal judges firmly in the driver’s seat of making granular, technical determinations about things like the risks of trichloroethylene.
Perhaps the industry-skeptical streak exemplified by cabinet picks like RFK Jr. can help sway some of the incoming Trump team to the idea that regulation as a general principle is necessary and proper, even if his own personal ideas are fringe and often wholly unsupported. The public might not be clamoring for it, but they’ll miss it when it’s gone.
